Fox News: "Prime numbers have very little mathematical significance" | Hacker News Reader

Fox News: "Prime numbers have very little mathematical significance"

foxnews.com

38 pointsnpisenti19 comments

"Prime numbers, which are divisible only by themselves and one, have little mathematical importance. Yet the oddities have long fascinated amateur and professional mathematicians."

This article really highlights the need for better science journalism. Not to mention several paragraphs are plagiarized directly from this other article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23138-new-17milliondig...

I can only guess, though, that Fox News stopped reading that New Scientist article at the "diamond" metaphor because the next paragraph states directly that prime numbers "underpin the cryptographic techniques used to make online transactions secure," which even to the layperson should seem pretty damn important...

Fox News is bad at reporting everything. Why does this not signify the need for better journalism period?

If only that were true. I think that industry has done a good job of training people to expect insecure transactions.

They also appear to claim that the newly discovered prime is "2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times". It's been a while since I studied math, but I'm pretty sure that's not prime.

They missed the "minus one", it's correct in the second part of the same sentence.

He just phrased it unclear.

He should have written it like that:

>2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times (written mathematically as 2^57,885,161) - 1

They get it wrong in the image tagline too.

"A small portion of the 17 million digits in the number 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times -- the first Mersenne prime discovered in four years. (FoxNews.com)"

It is true that 2 multiplied by it's self 57,885,161 times is not prime. However, if you subtract 1 from that the result is prime.

Misquote in title. Actual quote reads:

"Though there is little mathematical value to finding a single new prime"

Which to me is a perfectly reasonable sentence.

Edit: Doh sorry, everyone is right later in the article it says a stupid

It says also says later: "Prime numbers, which are divisible only by themselves and one, have little mathematical importance."

Nope. If you read two paragraphs further:

>Prime numbers, which are divisible only by themselves and one, have little mathematical importance. Yet the oddities have long fascinated amateur and professional mathematicians.

Admittedly, getting through a full Fox News article is no fun.

Later quote from the article reads:

"Prime numbers, which are divisible only by themselves and one, have little mathematical importance. Yet the oddities have long fascinated amateur and professional mathematicians."

OP, please heed http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.

* If the original title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link anyway.

* Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.

Editorializing titles is explicitly frowned upon: you're sharing an opinion rather than sharing the article itself. The remaining news has already been posted repeatedly, so really this should not have been posted at all.

I'm a huge fan of Wikipedia's Simple English wiki, and its page on prime numbers gives a great example of why:

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number

Without having to wade through pages and pages of information, you very quickly gain an understanding of the basics.

A 30-second skim of this page - which includes "Prime numbers are very important in mathematics and computer science." - would've prevented this reporter making such an obvious mistake.

"Fox News Publishes Crap" is not really news.

Which network doesn't publish crap?

This is a REALLY bad headline. That pull quote does not exist ANYWHERE in the article.

As much as I dislike Fox "news", this headline feels like complete BS.

I'm not a big fan of Fox news (or any mainstream media for that matter) but in their defense, they basically reprinted the article from New Scientist. They even linked to the original article in their story.

Their first statement "there is little mathematical value to finding a single new prime" is very true, but in the second half of the article someone demonstrates his 'competence'...

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